Hermeneutics

4 October 2017, 17:00
- 19:00

Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway, University of London)Alison Scott-Baumann ( SOAS, University of London)

Hans Georg Gadamer contended that the task of hermeneutics ‘is to clarify the miracle of understanding, which is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning’ (Truth and Method, 1960). But what underpins such a ‘common meaning’? And what might modern theories of understanding owe to earlier traditions of scriptural interpretation? This session begins our explanation of reading by considering how the discipline of hermeneutics — the art of interpretation — developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.